by Scottie Westfall

Archive for the ‘cryptozoology’ Category

A few days ago, I came across a story about a jaguarundi sighting in New Mexico, and I have to say I was pretty excited. I have been following accounts jaguarundis north of Mexico, and I have had great hopes that they will finally have a breeding population in the United States again soon.

Jaguarundis historically ranged into Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but we have no breeding population. A few years ago, there was talk of them being restored to South Texas, but I’ve heard nothing new about that project. My guess is it fell apart as the new austerity regime took over.

Jaguarundis have been known in the fossil record from Florida, and of course, there are countless sightings of jaguarundis in Florida and in Alabama as well. None have been confirmed, of course, and if they were discovered in that part of the country, they would be the first ones known in historical times. And they definitely would have descended from “released captive animals. But the current thinking is that most of these Southeastern jaguarundi are misidentified domestic cats, bobcats, and even otters.

After hearing that story about the possible jaguarundi in New Mexico, I went on a Google safari for potential sightings in the US.

Most of them were quite weak sauce, and I have to say that people really do need to look carefully at photos before posting them

One of the most egregious is this one by a blogger called “Texas Cryptid Hunter,” who claims that the below trail camera photo is of a jaguarundi in Missouri or Mississippi.

That animal sure does look like some kind feline, right?

Well, it’s not feline at all.

It’s a gray fox. There are two big identifying features that say this is a gray fox in a subtropical summer coat. The masking is very unjaguarundi-like, but it is very much like a gray fox. But that alone isn’t enough to scream gray fox at me.

Check out the tail. There is a black stripe running down the tail. No other carnivoran on this continent has that feature, and jaguarundis certainly don’t.

Gray foxes and their cousins, the island foxes of the Channel Islands of California, have this feature.

Further, notice that the deer and the creature seem to be eating the same thing. My guess is that the trail camera was set out near a deer feeder, which shoots out corn. This is a common practice where it’s legal, especially in late summer. It allows the deer hunter to figure out which bucks are developing the best antlers.

A little known fact about gray foxes is they are quite omnivorous, and they particularly like to eat corn from deer feeders.

My guess is the deer and fox were eating corn on the ground, and because the fox is in summer pelt and is holding its ears close to its head, it looks a lot like some kind of cat.

It’s an easy mistake to make. I initially thought the first gray fox I saw running in the broad daylight towards me was a cougar!

Cougars and jaguarundis are close relatives, and compelling molecular data suggest that we ought to classify them in the same genus, which I tend to do. So I can see where someone might see a gray fox and think it’s a jaguarundi.

I am friendly with the cryptozoology community, but I do know there is a tendency among people who “believe” in “cryptids” to be hold fast to bad pieces of evidence. I don’t think there is compelling evidence for bigfoot or long-necked dinosaurs in the Congo, but I’ve run into people who absolutely know these creatures exist.

So it is really hard to have a conversation with people who have decided that a piece of evidence is “the truth.”

I also know there are some sportsman types who will tell me there is no way that can be a fox. If you can find me a photo of a jaguarundi with a black tail stripe like the animal in the photo, I will stand corrected.

You won’t find it.

I still think that jaguarundis belong in the US, but if that asshole orangutan who thinks he runs this place gets his way, we will have big ol’ wall that keeps them stuck down in Mexico.

And we won’t have a chance at restoring jaguarundis to our southern border country.

Like this:

I don’t believe in them, though if you travel up the roads in most of West Virginia and ask around, you will find people who believe. More than believe, they know.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t think there are any wild felines in the whole state but bobcats. I don’t think there are any cougars lurking about. Cougars were here, and one might wander in from the West.

But I don’t think there are any native “Eastern cougars” left.

And now, I don’t need to say that I don’t believe in black panthers roam the forests of the Appalachians.

But if you did a poll in West Virginia, I am dead certain that you’d get a majority believing they exist here.

It’s an odd thing, for the only large cat that routinely comes in black in the Americas is the jaguar. North American jaguars are very, very rarely black, and although one can talk of the old stories of wandering jaguars popping up well into the United States, the truth of the matter is the species has a very limited range in this country. The ones that live in this country all are male, and all live along the border with Mexico.

Black leopards might have been turned out here, but no one has found a breeding population of these cats. Black leopards come almost entirely from the tropical subspecies, and although there are jaguars that live in coldness of Korea and the Russia Far East, those subspecies have no melanistic individuals and are not well-represented in the captive leopard population.

If one were to poll people in West Virginia about the existence of bigfoot, only a tiny percentage of people would say they exist. Bigfoot is a ridiculous idea.

But black panthers are not.

I don’t know why the belief in these beasts is so persistent, but it may have something to do with the mystery of blackness. Blackness on cats has a strong connotation for people of Northwestern European heritage. Depending upon the region: Black cats are good luck. Black cats are bad luck. Black cats accompany witches.

So adding a black pelt to a massive cat gives it some sort of mysterious power.

Mystery is good. Romance is better.

And I’ve found once people believe something for those two reasons, good luck dissuading them of the moonshine (and I mean this under both definitions of the word!)

West Virginia is full of coonhounds, bobcat hounds, and bear dogs. One would think that if there were a population of big cats in this state, they would have been treed by now.

It hasn’t happened, but I know that one day, maybe not soon, but someday, a cougar from the West will wander into this state. It will be known, either from the trail camera photos or from a hound treeing, and half the state will lose its mind.

The DNR will say that cougars are protected species, and the guns will rage against the felines. Feral cats will be shot, and everyone who can will fill a few bobcat tags a year.

That’s because the cougar will be real, and in its reality, it will bring up that old-fashioned hatred of anything predatory in the woods.

But the black panther doesn’t bring that same feeling, and the reason why is that most people know somewhere back in their minds that they don’t exist in these forests.

They might not admit it in an argument at the barber shop. But they know.

Belief in the romance is what it keeps the black panther slinking along forest paths, slipping along until it crosses into the thick cover. It roars up in the imagination, wild and mysterious and untouched by encroachment.

It won’t be molested by the gun or the baying hound. It will slink on into the gray mists of winter, where it will roam as it always has in the magic and mystery of human reverie.

Like this:

A few weeks ago, we lost at least two canid species. Analysis of whole genome sequences indicated that the red and Eastern wolves are recent hybrids between wolves and coyotes. Indeed, this study also showed that the genetic variance between coyotes and wolves is equivalent to the variance between wolf populations, which actually calls into question whether coyotes are a valid species as well.

But this finding does not mean that there aren’t new cryptic species to be found in North America’s endemic canids.

I was just perusing some of the literature on gray foxes, when I came across this study in PLOS ONE. The authors sequenced mitochondrial DNA from 169 gray foxes from California and Georgia, as well as 11 “island foxes” and added in a sample from an aberrant gray fox that wound up in Washington State.

The authors were trying to figure out if California and the American Southeast represented a kind of “glacial refugia” for the species during the Last Glacial Maximum.

What they found was a deep divide between Eastern and Western populations. The California and Washington samples and those from the “island foxes” were estimated to have separated from the Georgia samples some 500,000 years ago. That’s actually greater than current genetic distance between Old World and North American red foxes, which separated 400,000 years ago, and are currently being proposed as distinct species.

We know from previous studies on Eastern gray fox mitochondrial DNA studies that the gray foxes of the Northeast are relatively recent colonizers from the Southeast. So my guess is that we’d find a similar divergence between gray foxes from New York and Ohio and those from California as was seen in this study with Georgia and Western gray fox samples.

Now, this study looked at only mitochondrial DNA, and this is only a tiny part of the genome. More detailed genetic studies are needed to determine the exact time of divergence between the two gray fox populations. Further, because this study included foxes from only California, Washington, and Georgia, it doesn’t really show us where the divide between these two lineages exists on the North American continent. More samples from across the range of gray foxes could give us that answer. My guess is there is a hybrid zone between the two lineages either in the Southwest or in the South-Central US.

But this assumes that there really this genetic divergence is confirmed with nuclear DNA sampling. It could be that the Western population just has an old mitochondrial DNA sequence that wound up surviving, even though the majority of the gray fox genome comes from same source as the Eastern gray fox.

It could be, but there is still a very strong possibility that Western gray foxes do represent a distinct species from the Eastern gray fox, and this question can be answered. We just need analysis from a bigger part of the genome from a broader cross section of gray foxes.

If there actually is a distinct species of Western gray fox, then it would be obvious that the island foxes, which have only been on the Channel Islands for 7,100-9,200 years, should be classified as part of that species. The authors found that no extant population of gray fox in California actually gave rise to the island fox, but there are similarities between island foxes and those in Northern California. But they were still part of this Western gray fox division.

I’ve thought it very odd that gray foxes live in Minnesota quite well, but in the West, they don’t come as far north as western Oregon. The Washington sample in this study was the first gray fox found north of the Columbia River, and western Washington has a much, much milder climate than Minnesota.

Maybe the differences in range reflect a difference between species. Maybe the gray fox of Minnesota is the same as the gray fox of Georgia, and this species has evolved more cold tolerance than the Western species.

There are just so many questions that arise from one study that has largely been overlooked.

And if there are two species of gray fox on the North American mainland, there could be several cryptic species of gray fox in Mexico and Central America. Maybe the isolated populations of gray fox in Colombia and Venezuela are also different species.

The Urocyon foxes are really interesting animals. They are the most basal of all canids, and among North American canids, they are the only one without any connection to Eurasia.

Most taxonomists divide the genus into two species: the gray fox and the island fox. The island fox was recently removed from the Endangered Species List, but I’ve always been very doubtful that it actually is a species. Most of the evidence now shows that it was actually introduced by people. Something very similar could happen with red foxes in Australia, which are now reproductively isolated from the rest of the Old World red foxes. Maybe in 9,000, they will be morphologically distinct enough for someone to declare them the “Australian fox” and work to preserve them as a distinct species.

But in focusing so much on this odd insular population, could we have missed the really big story about the urocyon? Maybe there were two species after all, but we never bothered to look into it.

Maybe one day, we’ll have Urocyon cinereoargenteus and Urocyon occidentalis as the two species of gray fox native to the United States.

Like this:

Trail camera photo of a black leopard in Africa, but often claimed to have been photographed in lots of different places in the US!

I am in the minority.

To an outsider, it might seem weird that I am in the minority, but I most assuredly am in a minority.

Here’s what gives me minority status:

I live in West Virginia, and I don’t think there are black panthers of any sort roaming the forests here.

If you go to any little town in West Virginia– or just about anywhere in rural America east of the Mississippi– and ask the first ten people you see if they’ve seen a black panther. You will most often hear either an affirmation that the person has seen one or they know someone who has seen one.

It doesn’t really matter that melanism hasn’t been officially documented in North American cougars or that cougars haven’t even been confirmed in this part of the East yet.

They’ve seen a black panther.

Maybe it’s a black leopard let loose on the countryside. That’s usually the claim when we hear the British talk of alien big cats:

Someone had a black leopard. The laws changed against their ownership. The leopard was turned loose, where it met other leopards who met the same fate.

In West Virginia, the panther casts a shadow long into the psyche. West Virginia is a place where the land was cleared and stock was run and crops were raised.

That world has largely disappeared as new industrial opportunities expanded in neighboring states. Those who remained got jobs off the land, where could afford to buy things that were grown or butchered out of state.

The old fields grew in with brush. Then the trees returned.

If you look at densely-forested hillside long enough, you can imagine any number of fell beasts residing in the thickets and brush.

The great Appalachian writer Joe Bageant wrote of seeing a “panther” when he was only 5 years old. He saw it in a meadow near his family homestead in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle. Whether he saw such a creature is certainly up to question. Bageant died in 2011, and this writing is but a distillation of a childhood memory.

In the meadow sycamore, a panther so black it is almost blue. Neither Nelson nor I have ever seen a panther. Never expected to in our lives. But there it is. Big as life. Nelson’s face shows almost holy amazement in the red light. He takes his pipe away from his quivering lip. Not that fear was a part of it, only awe of this beast. The panther drops weightlessly to the ground and glides into the loblolly* pines with all its lithe power. We let out our breath. We gesture at each other for a minute, then trot for home. By the time we reach the house twilight had settled.

“Maw,” I blurt. “We seen a panther down by the big sycamore. Black as night. Long and black as night.”

Maw turns away from the hand pump by the galvanized sink where she had been drawing dishwater. “Never been a panther in these parts I know of,” she says. But the set of Nelson’s wide dark face tells her this is a true thing. “Hear that Pap?” she asks. “The boys seen a panther. A panther is a sign of war and troubles of war.”

My grandfather frowns, says nothing in reply. Then he raises up his lanky frame from the kitchen chair, picks up the kitchen slop bucket and heads for the hog pen.

What about the sign of war? I wanted to know. Silence from Maw. Well, if it was a sign, I figured, Maw would sure as hell know about it. Maw knew her signs. Maw knew what poultices cured chicken pox, how to plant and reap by the almanac.

And that was all I ever got in the way of answers about the panther and the sign of war. I would one day learn that panthers were among the first beasts killed off by the English and German settlers in our region, along with red wolves [sic] and the eastern woodland bison. And that black is just one of the color possibilities of panthers anywhere on the planet. But in that day and in our world on Shanghai Road along the drains of Sleepy Creek panthers inhabited their place alongside witches, wolf trees, milk drinking snakes and other such creatures as prowled the subconscious and gave explanation to the greater unknown.

Even though I’m actually only removed by three generations from people who lived much like this, it doesn’t change the fact that I am indeed removed from it.

When I was a child, I had a blowhard relative call up everyone in the family that he had killed a bobcat while deer hunting.

It certainly captured my imagination, and I was really thrilled that he was going to have his trophy “stuffed,” so that I could see when we went visiting over Christmas.

Even now I can remember my great disappointment, when I was brought into the room where the trophy cat had been set up for display, only to discover that he’d shot a tortoiseshell Manx cat. The taxidermist had done a good job polishing up this fake bobcat, but it didn’t change anything.

By then I’d learned to keep my mouth shut, and I let everyone bask in the glory of a dead house cat. I remember someone asking how such a little cat could kill such a big thing as a deer and just cringing.

West Virginia is a place that needs its panthers. It doesn’t matter if they are real or not, any more than it mattered whether my relative had killed a bobcat. This is a place that needs its folklore, its animism, its spirits in order to commune with a great unknown that becomes more perplexing every day.

Black panthers dreams must be real, for it is only in their possibility that gives the land its magic, its mystique.

As much as I’d like there to be black panthers in the forest here, I know they really don’t exist here. But I still look into woods in hopes I might be wrong.

________________________________________________________________

*He probably means same tree that my grandpa called a “jack pine,” which is more properly known as a Virginia pine. True jack pines grow well to our north, while loblollies are the common pines of Eastern North Carolina and also grow in coastal Maryland and Virginia. But not in the land west of the Blue Ridge.

The scent of canid estrus wafts out of the clouds of the Harenna Forest in Ethiopia’s Bale National Park. It floats out of the wet jungle into the land of lichens that lies way up high in the Sanetti Plateau, where he smells it.

He stops to savor the scent, which is almost like that of his mother and sisters but not exactly.

Yet is strangely beguiling.

His kind are the red-coated “wolves” of the Ethiopian Highlands. They are Africa’s rarest canid and may be the rarest of all wild dogs. They spend their days hunting big-headed mole-rats and other rodents. They are rare and found only in these Afro-Alpine lands of Ethiopia.

His kind stay in the open moorland of lichens. They don’t wander down in the cloud forest. That is the realm of the black leopard, the creature that savors the taste of dog-flesh above all others and would love nothing more than to swipe an arrogant little tawny wolf.

But the smell is strong, and the last few months have been hectic in his pack. The bitches have all come in estrus, and his mother ran off his older sisters. By the law of Ethiopian wolves, only one bitch produces a litter and that one bitch is the sole mate of a single male.

Thus, our wolf friend has spent a long time smelling the beguiling fragrance of estrus but never getting a chance to partake in any mating.

This smell isn’t quite the same, but it’s so similar that he can’t help be drawn to it.

He abandons his caution and wanders down into the clouds. He soon finds himself in the wet jungle of the Harenna Forest. Moss lies hard upon the trees.Strange little monkeys chatter among the bamboo.

And the scent grows stronger.

He keeps following his canine concupiscence through this strange world. For a creature so devoted to living in the open moorland, this jungle is a terrifying alien landscape. The buzzing of insect causes him to jump. The gentle falling rain upon the leaves vexes him.

Hunger soon begins set in, but just as he’s about to turn around and head home, he catches wind of some decaying meat.

He follows his nose and soon finds himself looking at the remains of a bushbuck. He also smells the odor of a cat of some sort, but it has long since passed. But smells another odor. It almost like that of his own kind but not quite.

He is in the land of strange wolves, and his hackles are raised.

He knows he might have to fight for a bit of food, but he doesn’t know who these strangers are.

He eats a bit of the meat and raises his head to scan the undergrowth. He must eat, yet he is terrified.

He hears the approach of canine steps. He bristles. The time for a fight is now!

Then the beguiling scent of estrus fills the air. The hackles go down. He doesn’t consciously realize that he’s becoming softened.

The sound of canine steps grows stronger. They stop. Then they grow stronger again.

Then out from behind a stand of kokisa trees comes the creature. Our wolf notices that this is source of the beguiling estrus odor, and though he was expecting a strange Ethiopian wolf from another pack, she not one.

But in some ways she is.

She is almost entirely gray with black hairs mixed in. Along the sides of her back the pelt mixes in such a way as to form two stripes, each running from her shoulder to her hip. Her tail is tipped in white.

She is a side-striped jackal. Her kind is numerous. They are found throughout Africa south of the Sahara and the Sahel. They are creatures of the brush and thicket. Their kind almost never makes it onto nature documentaries.

They are that banal, that common, that no one would would waste time filming a den-site or extolling their virtues.

Our two creatures stare at each other over the bushbuck carrion. Neither knows what to make of the other. 3 or 4 million years of evolution separate the two species. One is a specialist of an ecosystem that is dying. The other is a generalist of tropical Africa.

But the genetic difference between the two is trivial at this moment.

The young jackal bitch has been driven from her parents’ territory. She is too defiant of her mother over the kills they scavenge, and her mother just can’t handle such recalcitrance. Estrus made the situation worse, for in jackal society, only one bitch and one dog mate and have the pups. Her sister accepted her mother’s edicts that only she would mother pups, but our jackal bitch fought back and tried to mate with her brother and then her father.

One big fight ensued, and now our jackal bitch is running through the forests, alone and in estrus. She has no territory, and no other dog jackals from other families have courted her.

Her desire to mate is strong now. And though she’s has been eating off this old leopard kill– one that the old leopard decided wasn’t worth hauling up into the trees– she hasn’t been herself at all.

On her old leopard kill stands a jackal of sorts. He’s bigger than any jackal she’s seen before. He smells different, but he also smells good.

Part of her says to approach. Part of her says to flee. The former is pushing her forward, and as the wolf’s face begins to soften, she feels at ease.

She approaches the red stranger. They touch noses. She backs off. He wolf-grins. She pounces at him playfully. He backs off. They stare at each other again.

The ritual goes on for an hour. They begin to forget what they are. The strangeness of the moment becomes an odd sort of familiarly.

She licks his lips. He licks hers. He stands proudly with his ears back. She playfully paws him.

They smell each other.

She spins around and puts her tail to the side. He mounts. There is a tie.

For three days the eat from the bushbuck carcass and mate in the jungle. She alerts him to the scent of the leopard and shows him how much fun it is to chase monkeys into the trees.

On the evening of the third day, the young wolf stoops to drink from a puddle. The black leopard springs from behind a bush and is on the wolf before he knows it. The leopard doesn’t know that he has killed a rare wild dog. He’s caught a big jackal, and jackal meat is so tasty that he has to take it up into the canopy for storage.

The jackal bitch goes looking for her mate. She barks and howls into the night. There is no answer.

An old male side-striped jackal who hasn’t had a mate for year finds her. She still smells of estrus, so she is accepted by him. The two jackals wander off into the darkness. They mate one time, but the two remain together as mates. Within her grow the whelps, one of which is sired by the old male jackal, and the other is the hybrid with the Ethiopian wolf suitor.

The pups are born in the den she digs. One pup is a typical side-striped jackal, while the other is marked with tan points and a black tail with no white tip. The hybrid grows up as a jackal, though she is clearly different.

One day, a group of researchers comes across her and takes her photograph. Then they take many photos.

She is so strange that the researchers believe she is new species of jackal. When her photos are posted online, a lot of debate develops about what she is. Is a new species? Is she a hybrid of golden jackal (now a golden wolf) and side-striped jackal? Is she a hybrid of Ethiopian wolf and dog? Ethiopian wolf and side-striped jackal? Nah. She’s an unusual side-striped jackal without the stripes or the white-tail tip.

And the mystery jackal roams the Harenna Forest. The debate goes on.

This is the story of a hybrid.

***

The above is an entirely fictitious account of what might have happened to produce the unusual jackal in the photograph above. The current consensus— based upon looking at the many photos taken of the creature– is that she is an unusual side-striped jackal.

The truth is this debate really can’t be settled definitely. We have no DNA samples from the beast.

But the possibility of other hybrids beyond the usual subjects in the genus Canis has long fascinated me. It could happen. It just hasn’t been confirmed anywhere.

Although the likelihood of this hybridization occurring is pretty low, it is very likely that the two jackals endemic to Africa, the side-striped and black-backed jackals, can hybridize. The two species usually fight with each other, but there could be instances where they have crossed.

We just don’t have as many genetic studies on these jackals as we do with wolves, dogs, and coyotes.

But I bet there are some interesting stories in the genetic history of these canids.